Controlling the Silver

These Three Butterflies and One Bird We Interpret As Signs

28 These Three Butterflies and One Bird We Interpret As Signs i Historis Odius Odius Leave earth Nymphalid, soar and stay bourne within spirit breath, doctor breeze’s reviving, bearing currents. Do not pitch now or pause to malinger over sugar mill’s whatleft, trickledown leak, or lick blackstrap molasses. Avoid caprice breezeblow or any old batterbruise fruit. To feast on over-fermentation makes you white-rum drunken. Keep the pace, this trajectory will take you to fat-leaved feeding trees, far from poison pin and trap net, fly on, hard fi dead. ii Tiger Swallowtails When fully grown, Tiger Swallowtails have swift roaming flight patterns. Their unprepossessing caterpillars 29 are not much to look at, resembling droppings of dull-plumaged birds. But despite their crap appearance they persist in arching themselves to feed from chalice-petalled tulips, till one day they lift out of pupa state, flashing their V-shaped markings and at wing-tip, topaz tiger’s eyes. iii Urania Truth is, you are really moth’s blood relative. But unlike your Cuban cousins, you do not flock to the seaside with escape rafts, or show any predilection whatsoever for sea grape, cocoloba. And on account of your formal appearance, dark velvet dress with transverse bands of ruddy gold paved with powdered gems, some say you are swallowtailed butterfly which you are not. For often in winter before tourists arrive you’re found taking sun under mangroves, confounding lepidopterists claiming to be your superiors and most learned colleagues. So they believe. And then the Bird Banana Katy These green gold hands checked by tallyman hefted by broad-back gave you your name, Katy bird, go eat of them. 30 Last night we stopped at a hotel for dinner; a white-jacket waiter stripped one naked, doused it in cane liquor, and set it on fire. Katy it blazed like a cane field. Behind every bush lurked an African determined to return to Igboland or Guinea. Shadows danced macabre on terrace walls. Hibiscus oozed blood wounds crickets chafed hind legs beat wings riot riddims. Surf pounded like wardrums. Burnt sugar seared the air red-jacket waiters marched, marched like militia. Today we’ll just drive on and chew on the rose-heart of the good guava. Fly over there Katy, and feed on your banana. ...